The ubiquity and inexpensiveness of online services have transformed the landscape of how content is produced and consumed online. Thanks to the web, it is possible for content producers to reach out to audiences with sizes that are inconceivable using conventional channels. Examples of the services that have made this exchange between producers and consumers possible on a global scale include video, photo, and music sharing, weblogs and wikis, social bookmarking sites, collaborative portals, and news aggregators where content is submitted, perused, and often rated and discussed by the user community. At the same time, the dwindling cost of producing and sharing content has made the online publication space a highly competitive domain for authors.
The ease with which content can now be produced brings to the center the problem of the attention that can be devoted to it. Online content portals face the problem of ranking, prioritizing, and displaying their content. Such portals include online shops (hpshopping.com), news outlets (nytimes.com), community portals with user-created content (wikipedia.org), or media sharing services (flickr.com, youtube.com). These content providers vie for users' limited attention by resorting to a number of strategies aimed at maximizing the number of clicks devoted to their web sites. These strategies range from data personalization and short videos to the dynamic rearrangement of items in a given page, to name a few. In all these cases, the ultimate goal is the same: to draw the attention of the visitor to a website before she proceeds to the next one. A variety of different factors, such as the location and size of the user-selectable content on a web page, affect the amount of attention that a particular user-selectable content will receive. For example, user-selectable contents appearing at the top of a web page typically will generate more page clicks than user-selectable contents appearing at the bottom of the web page. The goal for many content providers is to optimize these factors so as to maximize the number of clicks on the web page. Most often, online content portals rank and categorize content based on its past popularity and appeal to users. This is especially true of aggregators of user-contributed content where the “wisdom of the crowd” is used to provide collaborative filtering facilities to select submissions that are favored by many.
What are needed are improved systems and methods of managing online content.